Christmas Is Coming: An Iron Throne High School Festive Special
by thatlannisterlifestyle
Summary: A Christmassy ITHS spinoff, set the Christmas before the events of the main story (so yes, Eddard is still alive!). Just a little tale about one of the Stark family's most memorable Christmases, hope you enjoy! All feedback and criticism appreciated.


**Christmas Is Coming: An Iron Throne High School Festive Special**

**A/N: Hello all! Encouraged by the success of the main ITHS story, I decided an in-universe one-shot about the Starks at Christmas might be a nice idea. I saw a festive spin-off as a chance to indulge my desire to write fluffy family cuteness about the Starks (including Ned this time), and I hope you also see it as a chance to read such cuteness. So enjoy! Thank you very much for all the favourable reviews and support ITHS has received, and merry Christmas to all who celebrate!**

Robb POV

"HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS!" Arya's desperately off-pitch singing voice, disproportionately loud for her small size, booms from the back porch. I sigh to myself. All of our neighbours on Winterfell Avenue who hoped to sleep in a little on Christmas Day can get rid of those hopes now. I don't envy them. I've only just woken up myself.

Arya has always loved Christmas, the three-week holiday from school, the one time of the year when all of her siblings will agree to play in the snow with her, the general noisy merriment that I'm sure she wishes could be socially acceptable all year round. Perhaps sometimes she loves it a little_ too _much, but the rest of us don't feel the same way about her singing. Especially when it's not yet 9am.

Beside me, my mother and father smile wearily at each other, knowing that while a little festive spirit is a wonderful thing, Arya's particular brand of it can get tiring fairly quickly. My father, being the kindly and just man that he is, doesn't want to be in any way hostile towards Arya, especially not on a day like this, so he gently coaxes her back inside just as she enthusiastically begins "The Twelve Days Of Christmas". She's in the middle of belting out the line about the five golden rings when she gives in to my slightly firmer command of "time to come in, Arya", and her face is somewhat dejected at not having had time to perform her entire repertoire. All that disappointment flows away from her, however, when Jon comes jogging down the stairs, typical teenage exhaustion on his face, but a childish wonder in his eyes that you only really see on Christmas Day.

"Merry Christmas, Jon!" Arya cries, leaping into her half-brother's arms.

"Merry Christmas. Lovely singing you were doing out there," he replies drily, and she answers with a light shove to his chest, too intelligent not to recognise his sarcasm. I smile warmly at them. The pair have always been close, and I think Jon loves Christmas just as much as his half-sister – it's the one time of the year when he can come back home to Winterfell and find my mother too happily preoccupied to remember to treat him any different from the rest of us. He's greeting her now, and the two of them, the only two people in our current household who don't share blood, manage to share a fraction of a smile.

Jon turns to me, and pulls me into a tight, brotherly embrace, his tidal wave of unkempt brown curls burying itself in my shoulder. I look down at his gaudily coloured Christmas sweater, emblazoned with cartoon reindeers, and try to hide my guffaw. "That doesn't look like your usual sense of style." I say, and he returns it with an embarrassed smile.

"At least I try to express myself during the Yuletide, instead of wearing the same white t-shirt I've worn for the _whole _of the past year," he smirks, looking down at my generic attire. He pauses before opening his mouth again. "Merry Christmas, my white-shirted brother." He sobers up, and embraces me again.

Arya, as usual, interrupts us. "Stop with the sentimentality and come on, guys! We _need _to get one good snowball fight in before Sansa gets her lazy ass out of bed and starts playing Mariah Carey." Jon and I can't pretend not to be excited with the prospect of snowball fighting, so we follow her outside, pulling on the thick down jackets that are so ubiquitous in the North. Looking behind me, I can see that she's also managed to drag Bran and Rickon away from the morning cartoon Christmas specials, no doubt with some form of mild harassment.

If anywhere else in Westeros received snow on the ground it'd be front-page news, but here in the North, anything under six inches or so is considered abnormal. And the Stark household takes its snowball fights _very _seriously. In a matter of minutes, Jon and I are partaking in what's better described as "tackling each other to the ground" than "snowball fighting", and Bran's built a snow fort to defend himself against Arya's lunatic snowball whims. Rickon's quietly retired to the corner of the garden to make a snowman, and I pity the poor kid for when Arya discovers the easy target that he is.

I'm just devising my next snowball plot – to cough the snow that collected in my mouth during the last tackle back into Jon's face, because to win a snowball fight in this family you need creativity – when I see Sansa walk onto the porch and take up her usual position of passive observation, her eyes affectionately rolling. As Arya promised, I can hear Mariah Carey's Christmas album playing in the hall. I look Sansa up and down, and smile pitifully to myself at how she seems to be the only Stark not to realise that Chelsea boots aren't really appropriate for Northern winters. Whereas it's a good thing that we have one calm, measured sibling in the household, sometimes I agree with Arya that Sansa can put a damper on things, being the only one of us with a distaste for rough and tumble.

Sansa also doesn't seem to realise the importance of never turning your back in a snowball fight. She's turning around to go back into the house when Arya seizes the opportunity to infuse her auburn locks with white, and bursts out in a fit of laughter.

"Arya! That's not in the Christmas spirit!" Sansa yells, as she haphazardly tries to mould the snow into a retaliation attack.

"Neither is you not playing with us!" Arya shoots back.

My mother senses the tension building in the garden, and pokes her head around the porch door. "Anyone want to open presents?"

The younger ones' faces light up, and they momentarily forget any newly forged snow rivalries. "Presents!" Arya cries as she bounds through the door.

"Not so fast," Sansa says in a condescending tone, following close behind her. "_Cards _before presents, sis. We save the best for last." She taps her younger sister on the nose. I think the patronising comment is her way of avenging her snowball attack. But Arya has too many older siblings not to be used to feeling inferior.

Like Sansa said, we start with cards. Underneath the fir tree in the living room, which is elegantly decorated this year with silver and blue baubles picked out by my mother, there's a stack of envelopes from various acquaintances. There are cards for Jon from his work colleagues, Grenn, Pyp and Samwell, and one for me from my best friend Theon, filled with a year's worth of in-jokes, most of them far too inappropriate to read out to my family. The Lannisters have also been diplomatic this year and sent us a card, and Tywin's scrawled "Wishing you the best in business for the new year", though he probably wishes the opposite.

"Only a Lannister would make a Christmas card solely about business," my father growls bitterly from his place at the head of the table.

Also in the pile is the annual card from Iron Throne High's headmaster, Mr Baelish. It's addressed to "Robb, Sansa and Arya", but below the printed greeting there's a message in our headmaster's spidery hand – "say hi to your mother from me". He writes this every year, and every year our mother answers our questions in the same way: "he's an old friend". I'm starting to wonder if she's omitting some of the truth.

It's then that I notice that there's only one small, wrapped present underneath the tree. One present? The six of us almost always get at least one gift each from our parents. I also notice that the tag on the present isn't addressed to any specific Stark child. My father sees where my eyes are wandering and stands to speak.

"Children, the gift you see underneath the tree is to be shared between all of you," he says, and his tone is kind, yet domineering all the same. "You will receive an individual gift, which will be the same for all of you." This confuses me. I can't imagine my parents buying a gift to suit both Sansa and Arya, or my mother wanting to give Jon something of the same quality as her gifts for her own children. My father continues. "Jon, as my eldest son, will you do the honours of opening the shared gift?" My mother glares at her husband, but doesn't say anything.

I lean over Jon's shoulder and see that he's unwrapping a small leather-bound book entitled "The Wolves of Winterfell: A Complete History of the Stark Family". There are audible groans from my younger siblings, and I can understand why – why do we need a history book containing the stories of our family's history that our father's been telling us all our lives? Jon turns to the first page to find a pencil note from my father tucked inside, and reads it aloud:

_To Jon, Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran and Rickon,_

_This gift may surprise you, but it will make sense soon. If you're interested in your other gift, turn to page 88._

_Merry Christmas and much love to all of you,_

_Your father_

Hungry for information, Jon flips to the requested page, and my brothers and sisters gather enthusiastically around him. Page 88 is part of a chapter about the family's heraldry, and there's an exquisite watercolour painting of the Stark crest, a prehistoric member of the dog family called a direwolf. We're puzzled for a moment, before my father stands to speak again.

"Direwolves have been extinct for centuries, but your mother and I figured huskies would do." He says, grinning, and my jaw drops. My father clicks his fingers, and on cue six husky puppies come running in from the back door, impossibly fast for their size. They must have been partly trained beforehand, because when they see us they disperse and each scamper to a different Stark sibling.

The pup that leaps onto my lap is already quite muscular for its age, with beautiful, stone-coloured fur that's rough to the touch. It sits calmly down on my thigh, and looks at me out of bright yellow eyes, and if dogs can smile, then I'm sure that's what I can see on its lips.

Jon's pup beside me, a very pale dog, perhaps an albino, is decidedly more active, jumping up and down and licking its owner's face. And it's in that moment that I realise why we were given the seemingly purposeless history book in addition to the puppies. Watching Sansa gracefully lean down to stroke her smoke grey pup, and Arya make a beeline for the snow-covered garden with hers running alongside her, and feeling my own slump affectionately against my chest, I finally feel like a Stark of old, with my loyal direwolf companion, even though we're in a modern living room, with huskies replacing the direwolves. Perhaps that was my father's plan all along.

Later, we eat our annual Christmas dinner, with our turkey and the majority of our meat from the pine forests not far from Winterfell Avenue, and share all manner of anecdotes, as has become tradition. We don't have any extended family visiting, as Uncle Benjen, who works at the same security firm as Jon, is busy with his new promotion at his job, and Aunt Lysa seems to have taken the hint that we mainly invite her because of obligation rather than any kind of affection. The absence of her aunt's watchful eyes certainly pleases Arya, who happily flicks food across the table at Sansa, to only a mild scolding from our parents. Sansa herself is not nearly as dismayed by this as she would be usually, as it gives her an opportunity to toss the Brussels sprouts falling in her lap to her husky, who lies expectantly on the floor.

Names for our new puppies is a popular discussion topic at this year's Christmas dinner. Sansa's settled on the name Lady, Bran's chosen Summer and Arya's husky has been christened Nymeria, after a warrior queen she learnt about in history class last term. Rickon, being only seven, somewhat ironically decides to name his majestic black husky Shaggydog, or "Shaggy for short". Jon's sitting next to me, and leans over to whisper in my ear.

"What's yours called?" He asks, gesturing to the husky pup reclining at my feet. "Come up with something better than Rickon, _please_."

"I don't know, Jon, I suppose I'm not a very imaginative guy. I might just go with what was outside the window the day I got him." I point through the French windows, where a harsh blizzard is turning the ancient terraces of Winterfell Avenue silver. "Grey Wind."

"Nice. Mine will be Ghost. After all, I am the most ghostly one in this family." My smile fades away. Even though it's Christmas, Jon still can't forget about his status. I would say something to reassure him, but I can't pretend to know anything about what it's really like to be in his situation. Our brief melancholy is forgotten however, when our father clears his throat, his glass of mulled wine raised, to propose a toast.

"I propose a toast to my six children, and their newfound companions. With direwolves by their sides, or as close to direwolves as we can get, they really are true Starks. Wolves of Winterfell, if I am to quote the history book. Here's to the New Year, and I wish everyone sat at this table a very prosperous one." He smiles genuinely at the six of us, and beside him there's a pride in my mother's blue-green eyes.

I pat Grey Wind on the head, and raise my glass in unison with the others. "To the New Year!"

My father smiles even wider, and sits back down in his chair. "May it be our best yet."


End file.
